In order to understand the history of incident presentation, you need a good understanding of what it takes to reduce injuries. The accident pyramid model used many years ago as we will discuss will provide some useful information.

In 1969, a study of industrial accidents was undertaken by Frank E. Bird, Jr., who was then the Director of Engineering Services for the Insurance Company of North America. He was interested in the accident ratio of 1 major injury to 29 minor injuries to 300 no-injury accidents first discussed in the 1931 book, Industrial Accident Prevention by. H. W. Heinrich. Refer to Figure 1.

Risk is a perception.
Our perception of risks is mainly affected by two factors:
(a) whether we are voluntarily accepting the risk.
(b) potential consequences of event or act or decision.
For a layman, judging a risk is often a function of catastrophic potential. For example, working in a nuclear plant is considered riskier than driving on the road, whereas statistics show that more people are killed every year in automobile crash than in accidents in nuclear plants.
The higher the perceived risk by the people the more is the demand to reduce such a risk, and consequently more people want to see stricter regulations to reduce risk.
As a result it piques interest from government, regulatory bodies, and policy makers and there is an increased incentive to have a regulatory oversight.
Perception of future risks affects regulations …

From our friends at Workplace Safety, a good primer on combustible dust in the workplace.Things that go boom – combustible dust hazardsPerforming the combustible dust assessment... Make sure you are prepared by assessing the risk at your facility and following combustible dust safe ...workplace-safety-nc.com/articles/combustible-dust.html - Cached